His father had visited him in rehab twice a month, every month, for the entire eight months he was there.
He drove himself. Three hours from Enugu, sometimes four when the Onitsha bridge was doing what the Onitsha bridge did. He arrived on Saturday mornings with a bag that always contained the same things: a small container of food from their housekeeper, Mama Ngozi, a basket of fruits, and a Bible with a broken spine from years of use. He sat across from Chikamso in a plastic chair in a visiting room that smelled of antiseptic and other people’s difficult stories, and he did not lecture. He did not revisit the squandered money or the wasted years or the business opportunities Chikamso had been handed and burned through. He did not mention their mother, because they had an unspoken agreement that her name was a room they could not yet enter together.
He simply came. Every second Saturday, for eight months. He came and he sat and he asked about Chikamso’s week and he listened to the answer, and before he left he would rest his hand on the back of Chikamso’s neck the way he had done when Chikamso was a boy and say, in Igbo, quietly: I am here. I am not going anywhere.
Chikamso had not known, before those Saturdays, that love could look so simple. He had grown up believing it required performance — achievement, success, the accumulation of things that proved you were worth the oxygen you consumed. His father was a man of significant means and significant reputation, and Chikamso had spent his entire adolescence understanding that these things demanded upkeep. He had misunderstood. He had confused his father’s standards with his father’s love, and when he’d failed to meet the standards, he’d assumed the love was the thing he’d also lost.
